November 30, 2010

A newly released eclectic Greek New Testament became available this month. Michael Holmes has provided expert opinion on production of the new SBL Greek New Testament. I have only spent a couple hours with the text, in addition to working through Wieland Willker's review. I do have some initial reflections on the text that I could share.

The primary niche this text is filling is very clear. It is an eclectic Greek text from the SBL that provides a much more generous free-use policy than the Nestle text. There are situations where the usage rights from the NA27 have been limiting towards a project.

At the SBL general meeting, they were passing out hard copies to registrants. This hard copy is mostly worth what attendants paid for it. The Greek text uses the SBL Greek font, which is simply bad. It makes for awful reading, looking like perpetual italics. I was disappointed when the font was released and seeing it in this text is undesirable.

Also, the initial apparatus provided with the text is essentially useless. It serves as a descriptor for the process that Michael Holmes used to compile the text: take 4 eclectic texts(Tregelles, Westcott-Hort, Robinson-Pierpont)and compare them in order to catch all major variation units. This might be acceptable if it weren't for the fact that it doesn't make the NA text a major text to compare, only mentioning it when a variation differs from the less-scholarly-backward-transation "Greek text behind the NIV". But in the end, when I'm reading my NT, I don't care if a variant came from Westcott-Hort, but rather which manuscript it can be found in. Others have indicated the apparatus must simply be a stopgap solution. I would think so.

And finally, regarding its use. There are certainly places where the NA text needs a second thought. (See, for instance, Willker's exhaustive list.) I am eager to learn more about NA28 which is in the pipeline. But while Michael Holmes is very qualified (see, for instance, his work on the text of the Apostolic Fathers), the reader of scripture will benefit all the more from evaluation by committee. Holmes does in a way dialogue with the opinions of Tregelles and Hort, etc., but in the end they are still his evaluations.

Update:
Stephen Carlson has an excellent post on the apparatus, and keenly points out one benefit of the apparatus is that "a full two-thirds of the apparatus is listing differences with the Byzantine textform, enabl[ing] the user of the SBLGNT apparatus to get a very good sense of what the Byzantine text reads."

Further Update:Michael Holmes graciously pointed me towards a very helpful faq blog post he has on some aspects of the SBL-GNT creation choices. You can find it here.